In rural environments, it is the common practice to provide individual water supplies to homes and other buildings when municipal water service facilities are not economically available. The individual water services usually require the drilling of a well of sufficient depth to reach a suitable underground water supply together with such additional accessory equipment as a pump, a house tank, and necessary piping and controls to provide a complete automatic system.
Prior to the appearance of underground water pollutants and contaminants, these prior art individual water service systems satisfactorily served the required purposes and sufficient quantities of adequate quality water could be pumped from the well for immediate use within the home or other building. However, more recently and in alarmingly increasing occurrence, the groundwater supplies to such wells have become contaminated, thereby rendering the water unsuitable for healthful use upon the premises. Because of such problems, local and federal drinking water guidelines have been established to protect the health of the users. When the contaminants exceed the recommended maximum levels, the regulations usually require that the existing water systems either have to be abandoned in favor of a connection to an existing approved municipal water system or else a new source of water of acceptable quality must be tapped by drilling a new or deeper well.
In either instance, considerable costs must be anticipated, especially when there is no proximate municipal water main available for hookup. If the option of drilling a new or deeper well is chosen, such a procedure is not without risk inasmuch as even after undertaking the expenses involved in the drilling, there is no assurance that the new aquifer, if available, will not also be similarly contaminated. In other approaches to solving the contaminated water supply problem, some prior well users have attempted to prevent contaminants from entering the building water supply system by employing filters of carbon or other suitable filtering material. Such filters have proved to be of only limited use in view of the fact that the carbon or other filter material has only a predetermined capacity to hold contaminants. When the carbon or other filter material capacity to entrain contaminants is exhausted, the filter must be promptly changed to prevent contaminants from passing therethrough directly into the building water supply system. At best, such filter systems are unreliable and present a continuous maintenance problem.